WHEN WE HEARD the specs of Evergreen, the scene was one of jaws hanging down and people almost falling backwards into the snowy ground. The only question at that point was, could TSMC make them on the 40nm process?

The real question that everyone is speculating about is the shader count. It is 1600 for Cypress, 800 for Juniper, going down from there. If clocks stay at their targets, more or less where the current R770 is, that should put the DX11 Cypress right on top of the GTX295 for a rumored $100 or so lower price, plus all the added features.

The GTX285 will almost assuredly get creamed by the cheaper low end Cypress/5850, and the pain waterfalls down the stack from there. The 180mm^2 or so Juniper will basically equal the 4870's performance for far lower cost to AMD, putting pressure on the low end GT200b parts and really hurting whatever Nvidia renames the G92 to this week.